ABSTRACT
Strachey must be greatly credited for focusing the attention of his generation on the here and now as the locus of psychic change with what he termed the “mutative transference interpretation”. He carefully demonstrated that the severe superego could only be modified if “caught in the act” in the present moment, when it is projected into the analyst. Strachey’s mutative transference interpretation became a template for psychic change for future generations of all schools of analysis. Here and now interpretations in the transference were attempts to incrementally modify the archaic figure, in the first patient, the dangerous, sexual, Oedipal mother, and in the second, the cruel, abandoning, hated parent figure. Modification took place when the flow of libido or hate towards the transference figure was experienced as occurring at the same time towards an analyst who had good, caring aspects and was essentially a good object.
